"Max Zucker, stood before the war. When Adolf Hitler came to power, he decided to emigrate from Germany and moved in with his son, who lived in the Soviet Union. The decision had fatal consequences, says Dmitry Volcek, editor-in-chief at svoboda.org.
In
1937, in Moscow, the NKVD accused M. Zucker of espionage, arrested him, and
deported him to Nazi Germany in 1939, following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. At the border, he was turned over to the Gestapo staff. Since Zucker was a Jew born in Poland, he was sent to the Warsaw Ghetto. On October 23, 1941, he was fatally beaten in the street in the ghetto by the SS. .... a protocol signed on January 5, 1938, by the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs of the USSR, Nikolai Yezhov, and the USSR prosecutor, Andrey Vishinsky, listing the names of 45 German, Austrian and foreign nationals condemned to expulsion from the USSR. After Joseph Stalin and Hitler became allies in 1939, refugees were betrayed and given to the Nazis as if by a conveyor. By the summer of 1941, the NKVD had sent hundreds of people to Germany. Many of them were members of Hitler’s defeated the German Communist Party. Stalin handed over communists and Jews, who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union, to Hitler.
Heinz Neumann, a member of the German Communist Party and former deputy of the Reichstag, entered the Soviet Union in 1935 with his wife, Margaret. In 1937, the NKVD arrested Neumann. He was convicted and shot the same day. His wife was sent to a camp in Karaganda for five years as a “dangerous element to the public”. In 1940 she was deported to Germany. Margarete Buber-Neumann wrote about this in a memoir “Between Two Dictators”:
… The train started moving during the night of December 31, 1939, to January 1, 1940. It carried seventy broken people … We travelled on through devastated Poland to Brest Litovsk. On the bridge across the Bug River, we were greeted by the staff of another European totalitarian regime, the German Gestapo. Three people refused to cross this bridge: a Hungarian Jew named Bloch, a worker convicted by the Nazis, and a German teacher whose name I have forgotten. They began to be dragged across the bridge by force.
The wrath of the Nazis and the SS immediately poured over the Jew. We were boarded onto the train and taken to Lublin … Lublin handed us over to the Gestapo. That is when we were convinced that we were not simply handed over to the Gestapo, but that the NKVD also gave the SS all the documents which related to us. Yes, for example, my dossier noted that I was Neumann’s wife, and Neumann was one of the Germans most hated by the Nazis … "
The Gestapo and the NKVD: a history of Soviet-Nazi cooperation -
